Don’t let me go.
I will never let you go.
As though in answer, fingers clasped her arm.
“Feyn.”
No….
Hard flooring beneath her back, sweat trapped within the heavy velvet of her gown, plastering her hair to her neck, a web of it over her face.
A face obscured her vision.
Jordin.
She started to push up, fell back, rolled to her shoulder along the floor. Her sleeve was pushed up, a wound bleeding from her arm. The blood was still wet, and she realized that somehow an eternity of terror had passed in the space of moments.
She was still staring at the wound when she realized the veins beneath her skin were fading. There, before her eyes, as though retreating behind a scrim. Her skin—hadn’t it been white? But now color flooded it. She grabbed her sleeve, pulled it higher. The golden hue darkened her flesh before her very eyes. Not as pale as it had been in her life as a royal—genetically engineered by the virus to breed bloodless beauty in its royals—but the color of skin as it had been
before
.
She lifted her gaze with wonder. There was Jordin, standing at arms’ reach. And behind her….
Roland, on a knee, face wet with tears.
Had either of them ever been so lovely to her? Even bloodied and
blackened from the fire of battle, had she ever seen a soul so tortured and beautifully broken? Roland, whom she had hated. But her heart rent at the sight of him now.
She looked at Jordin. At this woman with wisdom she could not even now comprehend. This woman endowed with more power than Feyn could have ever claimed.
“I’m….” Her voice faltered. She looked around at the Dark Bloods staring at her in confusion. They were hers once…. no more. For a brief moment she pitied them.
Back to Jordin. “I’m alive?”
“Alive.” Jordin smiled. “Very alive.”
“Like you?”
Jordin took her hand. “Yes. And not quite. It may take some time.”
Roland, five feet away, lifted his head, lashes wet, his cheeks smeared with tears and blood. “Jordin. I’m ready.”
“Yes. You are, my prince. You are.”
He rose and moved toward her, glancing at Feyn and then staring into Jordin’s eyes. There was a tenderness to his look that Feyn had never seen before—a lion bowing to a power greater than its own.
“Forgive me—”
“Shh, shh….” Jordin put a finger to his lips.
“Give me this,” he said.
“I will.” Jordin appeared luminous, not with light but with the same life that flowed through her own veins. A small smile touched her lips. “I will.”
Feyn twisted and looked at the senate doors where he’d stood. Saric. He was gone. She glanced around the chamber, but there was no sign of him.
“Where’s my brother? He has to know!”
“He does, Feyn. He knows.” Jordin’s voice was soft, as if her words held great meaning to her. “You’ll see him soon enough. There are more urgent concerns on his mind right now.”
Memory of the battle suddenly came storming back, shoving aside the surreal scene before her.
“The battle! We have to stop it.”
Roland glanced toward the entrance, as though only now remembering the war waging outside himself.
Feyn pushed up onto her knees, turned to the Dark Bloods.
“Stop the battle. Send word to the commanders. Pull back. The battle is won. I need the remaining Immortals alive!”
They glanced around as though lost. Had she not just spoken, given a command?
“They were loyal to you, bound by blood,” Jordin said quietly.
Bound by blood no more.
Feyn rose unsteadily to her feet, tugged at the clasp of her cloak, which had twisted around her neck, let it fall to the floor. She straightened and addressed the Bloods still shifting on their feet.
“You will go to the field and stop the war,” she ordered pointedly, shoving her finger at the door.
Some made as if to go, but others stood dumbstruck.
“Go!” Feyn shouted.
Casting glances over their shoulders, they began to file out, gaining momentum in their strides as they went. She watched until the last of them had gone and then glanced at Roland.
“You have no assurance they’ll obey,” Roland said, springing for his knife. He quickly sheathed it. “I don’t know how many of my men are still alive, but there’s still time. They, too, will take the blood.”
“My Bloods won’t follow your orders. I have to go.”
“Then go. I go for my men.”
Her eyes lit on the knife Roland had knocked from her hand. She moved toward it and slipped it into the sheath slung against her hip, praying she wouldn’t need it.
“The other Dark Bloods will all be dead within twenty-four
hours,” Jordin said. “After that, you won’t need to worry about anything other than burning the bodies.”
Dead. Every Dark Blood engineered or converted. She drew a slow breath of unexpected relief until—
“Rom!” she cried.
Jordin spun. “What of him?”
“I have to save him. I condemned him.”
Jordin took a moment. As she did, calm seemed to settle over her—the same serenity she’d shown earlier.
“Then you must save him.” To Roland: “I’m with you. Too many Immortals have given their lives today. No more.”
Roland took her hand by the fingertips, his gaze level as he lifted it to his lips. “Thank you,” he said and kissed her hand. “Thank you.”
And then he was turning on his heel, flying down the stairs, and striding up the aisle, Jordin close behind.
They would stop the battle, but Feyn’s mind was no longer on thousands of men. Only one.
Rom. The man who had first shown her life so many years ago…. the man whom she had sentenced to die a bare hour ago. Her heart was pounding. The memory of those bleak faces, that utter condemnation, returned to her.
But where had Corban taken him?
Maker, let me not be too late!
Feyn ran for the door, her mind spinning.
THE ENTRANCE to the laboratories had been left guarded by a single Dark Blood. He gave her a strange glance as she reached him, and for a moment she wondered if he would stand aside.
She brushed past him without a word, and he didn’t move to challenge her.
Only inside the great laboratory, lit by low work lights, did she
realize she’d been holding her breath. She strode past the first row of workstations before grabbing her skirts and breaking into a run.
Maker, let me not be too late.
She’d found new life. But she didn’t know how she could live with herself if she found Rom dead.
When she reached the dungeon cells, she found no sign of him. Her heart went cold. She grabbed the bars of the last cell and glanced at the lock. No, they wouldn’t have brought him here. Not to kill him.
She hurried back out to the great chamber, ran through the maze of tables and then back to the chamber that held the glass sarcophagi filled with Bloods in the making. The sight of those bodies had once filled her with pride. She’d once thought them a thing of beauty. Seeing their lifeless forms now, she was filled with revulsion. This was a place of horrors.
She turned, looked around, momentarily lost. And then she was moving with long, swift strides toward Corban’s private laboratory.
She slipped inside. The tables were full of dark vials, discarded trash, stents and tubing, crumpled notes, some strewn on the floor. She passed by the main lab toward the observation suite.
Even from outside, she could see light shining beneath the door. Her heart surged, daring hope. She opened the door to the outer room and stepped inside, breath quick.
There—movement through the window to the inner room: Corban, in a dark tunic without his lab coat, standing over the bench with his back toward her. His acolyte stood in the corner of the chamber, scribbling notes. And strapped to the chair….
Rom.
His head had fallen back, and he appeared to be bleeding from a fresh gash in his face. His sleeves were rolled up, a stent buried in his arm, tube dangling toward the floor and dripping blood.
As she watched, he lifted his head and opened his left eye. His other was nearly swollen shut. Feyn gasped, rushed to the inner door, and threw it open.
Corban spun from his worktable, startled.
“My liege! I was just….” He paused, cocked his head.
“Release him!” Feyn ordered. She would have done it herself, but the sight of Corban arrested her attention.
His skin, pale as hers had once been, had begun to peel from his face. It lay open and ragged around sores that oozed pus. His hands, normally gloved, were bare, blackened in spots. The flesh was peeling from them as well.
He was squinting at her strangely, stepping toward her.
“Your face,” she said.
“Yes. My face. And my back. And my hands.” He held them up, backs to her, for her to see. “They’re rotting away even as I live. The result of prolonged exposure to the virus as I’ve slaved to find an antidote to save you. My gift is an early death.”
So he’d seen the difference in her. Felt the loss of connection between them, had already turned against her—she could see it in his eyes. And now she saw that he’d been in the throes of madness—working frantically to extract answers from Rom before killing him.
“Cut him free,” she said.
“Your lover? You care more for this
thing
than for me, the one who’s toiled at the cost of his skin to save your life! Never mind the cost to myself, I did it for loyalty. Because I must—we were bound by blood. But now I sense that you, my liege, are much changed.”
He crossed the distance between them in two long steps. Now she could smell the rot in his flesh. Could see that when he opened his mouth to speak, his teeth were edged in black.
His nose wrinkled in disgust. She realized for the first time that he could smell her—that the same offensive odor she’d associated with Rom and any Sovereign before came from her own skin.
“Your skin has lost its Brahmin pallor. And your eyes….” He reached toward her, as though to turn her cheek this way or that, but she slapped his hand away.
“Stay back!”
He made no show of hearing, much less obeying, her. “How did you do it? How did you manage it when I have found no solution?” He stepped closer, his breath foul in her face. “How is it possible that you find salvation and leave me to die?”
She gazed at him in silence. Hatred filled his eyes as the full truth settled into his rotting mind.
“Then it’s true. He said you knew the pollution of that ancient vial once.”
He turned away, slowly. Then, in a sudden fit of rage, he swept his arm across the table, sending vials and instruments and syringes and collection tubes crashing to the floor. The Corpse, Ammon, backed to the wall, eyes wide at the sight of his enraged master, notes clutched against his chest.
“You’ve abandoned us all!”
“Forgive me,” Feyn said, very quietly.
He spun and stared at her. It was the look of the damned staring the living in the face.
“Forgive me,” she said again.
The sound that came up out of him started as a keen. He grabbed his head, pulled at his hair, as it deepened into a guttural cry.
Ammon slid into the far corner.
“I created your army!” Corban raged. “I made your lovers, custom-built your minions—for what? Is this my reward? You have sent me to my grave!”
He spun back and launched himself at her. She threw herself against the wall, but he was on her, bleeding forearm pressing into her throat.
Behind him, Rom was straining against the leather straps, veins bulging from his neck, lips pulled back from his teeth.
“You did this!” Corban roared. “You’ve killed us all!”
Feyn struggled against his wiry weight. He was deceptively strong, as she once was. Her uncanny strength gone, she felt his
forearm crushing her windpipe, her weight coming off her feet, her body being shoved up along the wall. Pinpricks dotted her sight. She reached for his face, but he twisted away. She grabbed again for his hair, one of her thumbs stretching toward his eye.
Her lungs struggled in vain. Her body began to spasm for air. Desperate, she shoved her finger into his eye. The arm at her throat answered with crushing pressure.
She heard a growl in her ears, rumbling like the coming of a train. A low and rage-filled cry gaining in pitch from behind the master alchemist until it became a loud scream.
Something snapped. She wondered if it was her windpipe breaking, or her neck.
Another guttural roar filled her ears, this one from beyond Corban. In her failing vision she saw the movement behind him, sweeping in like a dark shadow. Rom, rising up.
Corban tried to snap his head round, but her thumb was buried in his eye.
Consciousness was failing her….
Corban jerked back, as if hit by a hammer. He crashed into the side table as Feyn slumped to the floor, gasping for air through lungs that refused to work fast enough.
Face bleeding badly, Corban flew at Rom, who ducked a swinging fist. He dropped to a knee, lunged toward Feyn, and grabbed the knife at her waist.
With a loud cry, Rom twisted and shoved the blade up under the alchemist’s ribs. Jerked the knife back out. Grabbing Corban by the front of his bloody tunic, he slashed the knife across the alchemist’s neck, slicing through throat and bone and larynx.
Corban stiffened for a moment, expression incredulous at the spray of red, before toppling forward.
Rom dropped to his knees, breathing heavily, bleeding from the stent still in his arm. He lowered the knife.
Feyn scrambled across the floor toward him.
“You were right,” she said, struggling to speak. “You…. were right, my love.” She reached for his head, which had dropped forward as he sagged. “There’s still time. Here…. Here….” She fumbled with her sleeve, and then looked at the instruments strewn around them.
“Don’t….”
“Hush. Let me just find….” Where was it? Where was Corban’s stent? She had seen one here. “You’ll take my blood. This will be over.”
Rom laid a hand on her arm.
“Feyn. It won’t work.”
“What do you mean? I’m Sovereign now. You were right! And I
see
.” She straightened, drew a long breath into her lungs. “For the first time, I know it. I know
life
.”